We will be closing one of the features on the board -- private messages. We will be doing this in about a week, so this will give everyone time to cut and paste any messages they want to save into a word .doc or other text format on their own computers.

There are several reasons we are doing this.

We do not allow private messages on the sufferer's board. We have never allowed it. There is no way for us to enforce rules of conduct that are so important to a safe community when the messages themselves are hidden away in private messages. People can be mean to each other and just flat-out break rules, and this goes against what the community is about.

The private messages feature uses additional resources on the server. Resources translate into money. Because MrFishy and I pay for this site out of our own pockets, sometimes we have to be conservative on additional, unneccessary features.

I say "unneccessary" for this reason: Everyone has the ability to e-mail each other through the board. Everyone has the ability to share ICQ, AIM, MSN and Yahoo messager IDs. We have a chat room. There are a variety of ways members can communicate one-on-one with one another. PM is like additional e-mail/chat we have provided at our cost, and for the reasons already mentioned above, it's just overkill.

Last but not least, it recently came to our attention that it's quite possible sufferers come and join the community here shearly for the ability to PM each other -- and to be able to do so in private, away from e-mail or the boards, where they can break all the rules we have put in place in the sufferer's community to help it be a safe place. We cannot control (nor would we want to) the things people talk about in private or in e-mail... but we'll be damned to have sufferer's come here and use these resources to further hurt themselves. If members wish to talk in private we have set up so many ways for them to connect to be able to do so -- but then it should be done in private, using their own methods of communicating, where Something Fishy is not responsible for the content of those private messages.

This has been a difficult decision for us because we know many of you enjoy using the PM feature and do so very appropriately (with much love and respect for each other). For the many reasons above though, I hope you can all understand why we are going to have to turn this feature off. We've spent a lot of time discussing this, and we really feel it takes very little away from the community-feel, support-group-like aspect of these boards.